Year One of the NBA's New Media Deal Is In

The 2025-26 season was the first one played under the NBA's new media rights agreement, the one that brought NBC and Peacock back after more than two decades, handed Amazon a package for the first time, and left TNT out after 36 years. The results are in, and they are good.

National games averaged 1.78 million viewers across NBC, Peacock, Prime Video and the ESPN networks, up 16 percent year over year and the league's most-watched season in seven years. NBC and Peacock together averaged 2.8 million, more than double the comparable windows from the previous season. The All-Star Game drew 8.8 million, its largest audience since 2011.

The number underneath the headline

Average viewership is the number everyone quotes, but it is not the interesting one this year. The interesting one is reach. Roughly 170 million people in the United States watched at least some NBA basketball this season, up 86 percent. Total time spent watching rose 22 percent.

Reach grew five times faster than average audience. That gap describes something specific: the league did not mostly add more people to the same games, it added more games in more places and picked up a much wider set of people who each watched a little. The audience got broader and thinner at the same time.

Not every window worked. Amazon averaged 1 million viewers across its 67 games, and on directly comparable windows it landed at 1.09 million, down 2 percent against what those slots did on ABC, ESPN and TNT the year before. Holding flat in year one of a new streaming package is a reasonable outcome, but it is not the growth story. The growth came from NBC putting games back on broadcast television.

Why it matters

A broader, thinner audience is a content problem before it is a rights problem. When 170 million people each catch a fragment of your season, the clip becomes the primary product and the full game becomes the thing a minority of them sit through. The people who saw one quarter on Peacock and the people who saw a Prime Video game in a different time zone are not going to be served by the same recap.

At Narrative Sports, we build the infrastructure for exactly that. Our platform watches the live broadcast, identifies the moments worth cutting, and publishes them in under 30 seconds, formatted for whichever platform the audience is actually on. When a season is spread across four national partners, speed across all of them is the whole job.

Sources: Front Office Sports (April 15, 2026); Sportico. Photo: "Player introductions before a Miami Heat game" by Gatorfan252525, cropped from the original, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 and shared here under the same licence.